It’s another deep powder morning and Jason calls me as planned. He’s leaving town and will be here to pick me up in a half-hour. “I’m not wasting time coming in to get you,” he says over the usual cacophony of Widespread Panic and arguments over where to lay first tracks. “If you’re not out at the gate when I get there, I’m not stopping.”

“Asshole,” I say, smiling, and then hang up, put on my boots and backpack, grab the skis and walk five minutes down the driveway to wait on the side of the road. I bullshit with the other neighborhood hitchhikers until Jason pulls up. The Rocketbox already has three snowboards and a pair of fatties and the car is filled with the rest of my Sarcastic Guy Posse.

The boys let me struggle, balancing in my tele boots on the edge of the backseat, my cables catching on poles and bindings. “Hurry up, Sussman,” Jon says, laughing, because he’s tall enough for this to be easy for him and I’m stubborn enough to resist help.

I am their buddy, their little sister, the token female who will be ditched as soon as I start to slow down. I am friends with their wives and girlfriends but I do not know how to knit or make jewelry. When the other girls come to the hill, the guys are suddenly patient and encouraging and buy pitchers of micro-brew instead of PBR.

Some days I ride with my Sensitive Guy Posse, who tell me they’ve missed me and that I’m doing really well for the conditions even as I’m making them wait. If I take a fall that has me wallowing in Cascade concrete for five minutes, I know that RJ will be waiting for me at the bottom. “I started to get worried,” he’ll say, kissing me on the cheek.

On other occasions, I find myself watching Luca and Beth from the top of a run, wideeyed at their rhythm, their perfect tele stances, the way they seem to effortlessly transition from turn to turn, floating their way down. This is the Women Who Rip Posse, who tell me what it is I need to do with my poles and remind me that they’ve been skiing way longer than I have. But if I start lagging too far behind, there is no hesitation: “We’ve got to do some quick laps, meet us at Chair 6.”

The days I ride alone, I can actually feel my feet under me, stop mid-slope to analyze my turns and take as long as I want at the top of the hill to look at the way the mountain has changed with each snowfall. There’s no chairlift banter after hitting a secret stash, no manic chase to keep up as the posse bombs down the hill, no decisions by committee about where to go next, and nobody taking me to the new line that last week’s snowfall created. Riding alone allows me to watch Shuksan shift in parallax as the chair carries me up for another run. I have time to understand that it doesn’t matter what you ride or who you ride with, but who you are when you ride.

Of course, when I mention this to the Sarcastic Guy Posse, Jon gives me a sideways glance and with his Masshole accent says, “Whatever, Sussman. You think you can make those pansy-ass tele-turns a little faster so we can get one more in before last chair?”

Abigail Sussman’s last story for MG was “Hitchhiking With Skis,” which appeared in #161. She lives in Gunnison, Colo.